


A Step Into the Past

by Morgyn Leri (morgynleri)



Series: Tapestries of Magic and Mind [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Accidental Marriage, Alternate Universe, Don't copy to another site, F/M, GFY, Sentient Magical Objects, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:28:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21576232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morgynleri/pseuds/Morgyn%20Leri
Summary: Regulus is going to hex his brother into next week for sneaking someone into the house andinto his bedroomwithout bothering to inform Regulus.Hermione thinks she might help, as she hadn't planned to go back twenty-eight years and wake up in what is no longer her room at Grimmauld Place.Sirius would just like the family tapestry to stop laughing at him, and for his not-exactly-a-plan to at least come out well enough.
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Regulus Black, Sirius Black & Regulus Black
Series: Tapestries of Magic and Mind [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1580071
Comments: 22
Kudos: 180





	A Step Into the Past

"I am going to strangle my brother."

Hermione isn't certain who's speaking, or why he's going to strangle his brother - whoever *that* is - but she's fairly certain he's not supposed to be in her room. She pries open her eyes, not particularly wanting to be awake, though the sight that greets her is enough to get her to sit up, eyes widening. This is not how her room had looked when she went to sleep last night, though she recognizes it still. It hadn't looked like this since Harry, Ron, and she had put in the effort to renovate Grimmauld Place.

And the person standing in the doorway, in robes that look out of date, should be dead. So should the brother he's said he's going to strangle.

"I don't think this is his fault." The words escape her before she can think better of them, something that she puts down to being exhausted and in the wrong time.

Regulus raises an eyebrow, stepping into the room as he watches her warily. "I don't think my mother or father would have put you up to this. They're a little too traditional for it."

"No one put me up to anything." Hermione slides off the bed, keeping a careful distance between her and Regulus. "I'm not sure how I'm here, even." How she's slid back several decades in time without intent or even noticing doing so. Back before she was born, she suspects. Or if not before she's born, she can't have made her second birthday yet.

"Presumably because someone snuck you in past the wards on the house, the wards on my room, and under the nose of my parents and our house elf." Regulus is looking skeptical. "Which the only person I can see willing to even attempt that is Sirius, though I don't know why he'd bother to come home just for this."

That implies it's at least after Sirius ran away. Hermione wants very much to ask what the date is, what the *year* is, but she doesn't know if that's going to help her or not.

"Would it help to know that I haven't seen Sirius in a decade?" Not since the fire-call in her fifth year that had ended so abruptly. Regulus doesn't need to know that a decade in her past is closer to two into his future. Or lack thereof.

"Not really." Regulus follows Hermione as she edges away from the bed toward the only chair in the room, keeping her from putting any furniture between them. "He's perfectly capable of putting someone up to this via owl."

"I haven't heard from him in almost as long." Technically, she'd never corresponded with him, but that's beside the point.

Regulus snorts, shifting slightly in a way that Hermione recognizes from learning about formal dueling after the war. A defensive stance, if not yet a prelude to an actual duel. "If Sirius didn't sneak you in here, who did?"

No one. This is her room, if three decades or so too early. "I don't know." She'd like to know, but less than she'd like to know how. If she knows how, she can figure out how to fix it. If it can be fixed.

Regulus narrows his eyes, watching her for a long moment. "What do you know about how you got here?"

Hermione lets out a small huff of involuntary laughter. "I fell asleep in my own room and woke up here. Nothing in between, which should be impossible."

"Moving one sleeping girl?" Regulus looks puzzled a moment.

"Moving me while I sleep is a good way to get punched or hexed."

Regulus coming into the room before she woke up wasn't enough to make her react that badly anymore, though that's as much that Grimmauld Place is somewhere she feels safe as anything else. Something that apparently extends to the house even now, though she's certain that if the residents now found out she wasn't a pure blood, it would be markedly less safe.

"Oh." Regulus looks both a little more wary and far too understanding for Hermione's comfort. He's silent for a moment before he draws a breath, straightening a little. "What is your name?"

She can't give him her name, and risk her younger self, or have him suspect she's Muggle-born. Not right now, not with the current political climate, and not in this house. "Hermione Barnes."

The family name is one she remembers seeing on the Black family tree while they were scrubbing years of grime and soot off, though the branch vanishes some years back. No one married in that generation, at least none that remained on the family tree. It's good enough to give her at least some coverage.

Regulus frowns. "Which branch?"

"I'm afraid I don't know. My father doesn't talk about his family." Hermione gives him an apologetic smile. It's true enough, if mostly because her father didn't talk to much of his family even before Hermione had modified his and her mother's memories and sent them to Australia. Something about how the extended family hadn't been particularly keen on his wife, and even less so when Hermione was born and they had more evidence that it wasn't just some kind of infatuation.

"Ah." Regulus's lips twist a moment before he shrugs. "Your mother?"

"Came for an education, stayed for my father." Or rather, chose to find a spouse here instead of agreeing to let her father find her a husband back home. She had visited home every year, and is doing so again after Hermione had returned her memories. Hermione and her mother are still working on rebuilding some kind of trust, and she hasn't been entirely welcome to join her mother's family again, not yet.

"Pure-blood?"

Hermione narrows her eyes, crossing her arms over her chest as she glares at Regulus. "My father was good enough to be accepted as her husband. Whether or not anyone in Britain actually counts her blood as pure enough for their inbred families doesn't matter."

Regulus blinks, then bows, something formal of which the exact nuances Hermione doesn't - for all her research - have the knowledge to parse. "My apologies, Miss Barnes."

She is silent a moment, watching him, before she nods in return. "Apology accepted."

* * *

Sirius glares at the sprawling branches of the Black Family Tree, trying to figure out why it hadn't done what he'd been trying to get it to do. Oh, he'd managed to get Hermione on there, but... He'd intended to just bolster her cover identity. Not this. Not at all this. Regulus might not strangle Sirius's seventeen-year-old self, but Sirius can already imagine the hexes that are going to come his younger self's way when the winter holidays are over.

This was not going at all how he'd planned. Well. Hoped. It's time-travel, and he's been unfortunately discorporated for something going on ten years. Not a ghost, not really, and not entirely dead. Dead enough to have been called by that stone eight years ago, but not dead enough to move on. Or to even manifest as a ghost. He'd tried.

"Bloody recalcitrant tapestry," he mutters, keeping his voice down in case the time travel had given him enough oomph to be a proper ghost and heard.

He has a distinct impression that the magic in the Family Tree is laughing at him, and he growls, baring his teeth at it. Nothing changes. The glittering gold line that connects Hermione Kabatesi Barnes to Regulus Arcturus Black remains stubbornly present. At least it allowed him to run the line for her father back up to the Barnes branch already present on the tapestry. His mother won't have cause to burn Regulus off for this.

Letting out another quiet growl, he turns away from the tapestry, drifting through the house back up to Regulus's room. His brother is standing outside the door patiently, as if he's stepped out for propriety's sake.

The door opens a few minutes later, and Hermione steps out in a robe that Sirius thinks was transfigured from something he'd left behind when he'd run away. He hadn't had a chance to take anything that wasn't in his school trunk already, after all.

"My mother is expecting me to join her in the drawing room." Regulus extends his arm to Hermione as he speaks, and she takes it without hesitation. "I shall tell her I suspect some mischief from Sirius, though I am still at a loss as to how he has accomplished it."

"Or what he intends by it?" Hermione raises an eyebrow at Regulus, whose lips twist in wry amusement, though he hides it swiftly.

"Mischief is a goal in and of itself for my brother. He wouldn't need any excuse but knowing it would put everyone out of joint." He guides Hermione down the stairs to the first floor. "If he intends anything else, I would be surprised."

Of course he means something other than mischief! He wants his little brother to live, and if he can keep James and Lily alive as well, he will call this exercise well worth the unexpected kinks in his plan.

"I would hope he had more than mischief in mind with this." There's an irritated note in Hermione's voice that makes Sirius look closer at her a moment. She doesn't seem to see him, and it didn't sound as if she was pointedly emphasizing anything. So, probably not aware of him, which makes him suspect he's still not able to manifest as a ghost.

He's undecided if that's a good thing or a bad thing in this house. On one hand, it would make it more difficult for them to exorcise him. On the other, he can't explain to Hermione what he wants to do here, nor can he effect physical objects directly, save for things like the tapestry that are utterly marinated in centuries worth of magic.

Regulus sighs, giving Hermione a small smile before guiding her into the drawing room, where Walburga has ensconced herself across from the tapestry Sirius had been arguing with earlier - she must have come in just after he came out, he thinks. Studying it. Sirius holds his non-existant breath, hoping she'll accept the changes.

"Regulus." Walburga's voice is steady, if already sharp. "I do not believe your father gave you permission to so much as court anyone, much less to wed."

"What?" Regulus blinks, stopping short just inside the door of the room. "I did no such thing, mother."

Walburga turns to look at him, narrowing her eyes a moment before she gestures sharply at the tapestry - with her off hand, not her wand hand, Sirius is glad to notice. "Then explain this." She pauses, gaze fixed on Hermione. "And explain her."

"Miss Barnes was in my room when I went up, and apparently unaware that she was not in her own bed prior to my arrival." Regulus draws Hermione with him as he goes to look at the Family Tree. Staring for a long moment before he reaches out his free hand to trace the line that connects him to Hermione, and up her family branch to where it nominally began.

"When you are done strangling your brother, I'll help you to hide the body." Hermione has her gaze fixed on where she appears on the tapestry, and her voice is iron and ice. "I did not intend to marry anyone until I had established a career other than house-witch or society wife."

Sirius doesn't think Regulus would actually murder the younger Sirius, but the offer to help hide the body sounds distressingly genuine. Saving his younger brother at the expense of his younger self leaves James and Lily entirely too vulnerable, and he needs to find a way to communicate with Hermione as soon as he can.

There's a wash of smug warmth from the infuriating tapestry, and Sirius watches in something between horror and joy as James and Lily's names stitch themselves into the tapestry next to his own, the silver and gold of a triad marriage settling into place around them. Drawing Hermione's attention to it for long enough to read it before Walburga hisses, and Regulus drags Hermione swiftly out of the way.

The flash of a blasting curse hitting the tapestry makes Sirius wince as his name vanishes under char and ash, and James and Lily along with it. At least Hermione had a chance to see it, though exactly what she got from it, he doesn't know, and isn't likely to find out any time soon.

**Author's Note:**

> There is more in this AU, though whether it becomes a separate story or another chapter in this one, I am uncertain yet. If you want to get updates when they're posted, I recommend subscribing to the series rather than this story directly.


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